When Jojo was diagnosed with autism, I had to throw all my own expectations of what his future would look like out the window.
It’s like, I had pictured Jojo’s life as “climbing a mountain.” I had everything all planned out on how we would get to the top. And then (after diagnosis) realizing, I don’t even know what mountain he’s climbing!
My job as a parent, is then, not to determine which mountain he’s going to scale… My job is to make sure he continues to keep moving forward. Instead of looking ahead at the precipice, we just look at the next step… and then the next one, and the next one.
I learned to focus on just moving forward and letting Jojo determine his future for himself. I will always accept Jojo for who he is, but I will always push both of my kids to do more than they think is possible.
Every day, we work a little harder.
Every day we make a little more progress.
Every day we exceed our own perceived limits until one day…
We can look back at how far we’ve come and realize that with each small victory was another step forward — another height achieved — and we are looking down at all our accomplishments from top of our mountain.
Special thanks to H2Au: the stuff of our life for sharing!